Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
Milijanovic, Koca Kastavarac, and Kilian Oser—to support Petri getting full music coverage across the game. We set Kilian up with a copy of Petri's workstation so they could share Logic sessions. Kilian was then taking Petri's music stems and repurposing them to work with the music system. Dobri and Koca were then designing and scripting the music flow. It was a good collaboration which freed up Petri's time to concentrate on the narrative and emotional beats, but ensured that his music style and ideas flowed from the cinematics into the gameplay music. I really like this approach as it keeps a cohesiveness to the quality of the music and the final product. RR: I have to bring it up while we're on the topic of music— there's a 20-minute interactive musical smack dab in the middle of this game! Can you walk us through the process of creating the audio and collaborating with various teams on this wild sequence? RL: This question doesn't have a quick answer; the whole musical went through so many hands and had so many moving parts that describing the process could quickly turn into a reasonably sized novel. So, I'll try to distill it down to just the bare facts. The first step is writing the song. Sam writes the lyrics and hands them off to [the band] Poets of the Fall, who write the song. While this is going on, the mission design and environment art team are blocking out the level flow. They're trying to gauge the timing of each section and ensure the level is long enough if the player is running through it. Once the song was somewhat complete, one of our sound designers, Jeremy Corbett, went through the song, chopping it up, building the dynamic structure in Wwise, and creating a requirements list for the band. The structure of the musical itself is straightforward; it's basically a series of linear sequences interspersed with dynamically looping interludes. However, to maintain fluidity and sync, they are composed and designed to quickly transition from one sequence to the next, usually within a couple of beats. That's not so easy to do without it sounding jarring, so it takes a few tries to get it working well. Once the linear sequences are locked in and final, these can be handed off to the live-action team to work out the shots and choreography. Jeremy and our audio programmer, Iiro Rosell, set up a system in the game engine that could read marker data from Wwise. This allowed us to trigger events in the game from any point in the music. Jeremy then collaborated with the mission team to start filling out all the necessary gameplay cues and added placeholder video content. It wasn't until quite late in the process that live-action shoot material came back. When we put it in, two of our sound designers, Gulli Gunnarsson and Josh Bell, were in the studio one evening playing, and I got a message that "the musical just doesn't feel right, and we need to change it." The trouble was that the visuals were so stark and bold on screen, but the music didn't feel connected to the faces on the screen. Also, there wasn't any solid direct interactivity with player input; the music was changing, but the call- and-response with the player was lacking immediacy. Their proposition was to tie the vocal stems to the position of the video on the screen and have the music react to all the TV and light shifter interactions. So, we went back to the Poets and asked them to stem out the vocals from the track, and with a few late nights, Josh managed to get it all to work. These few small details tied it all together to what we have now. When the game shipped, watching reaction videos of streamers playing the musical was priceless entertainment. RR: Hearing about those crucial eleventh hour changes is fascinating. How did you balance the need for iterative refinement with the pressure of deadlines and the scale of the project? Were there any other specific moments or sequences that required extensive reworking or experimentation? RL: I've yet to hear of an AAA game project that doesn't have issues with deadlines, especially for the audio department. I've also yet to find the magic that can ease the deadline pressure. Shipping any AAA game is a huge achievement, and in my experience it's always messy. For Alan Wake 2, I was lucky enough to work with fantastic audio dev manager Anika Neubert, who really helped in defining the priorities and keeping an eye on the progress of the rest of the departments to know when things were changing or ready for audio. One thing I think we did well was defining our priorities early on. It 102 M PS E . O R G